Chapter 11
I lock the door behind me and stand in Eleanor's apartment and take a deep breath.
The storm is still working through the city. Lightning moves through the windows in slow pulses, lighting the apartment in intervals.
I cross the living room fast, driven by something stronger than fear.
Purpose.
The wall of books strobes white in the next flash. Hundreds of spines, leaping forward and vanishing.
I have zero interest in the true crime collection now.
My eyes move across the shelves. Art. Photography. Beautiful, expensive things collected by a woman who understood how to make darkness look tasteful.
Then I find it.
The old leather-bound book.
Larger than the others. No title on the spine. No author. Nothing stamped into the cracked brown leather to tell me what it is or who made it or why Eleanor kept it hidden among the rest.
The book I almost opened on my first day here.
I pull it free.
Several thinner volumes shift behind it and tumble forward. I catch one against my chest. Occult symbols cover the front in faded gold. Another book drops at my feet and falls open to a woodcut illustration: figures in robes, a ritual circle, something being summoned from darkness.
I stare down at it.
Eleanor wasn't dabbling. She was practicing.
I lower myself to the floor with the old leather book in my lap.
For a moment, I just look at it. The darkened edges that make it seem less aged than burned.
Then I open it.
The pages are yellowed and dense with text I can't read. Latin, maybe. Or something older pretending to be Latin. Symbols crowd the margins: sigils, diagrams, figures bent into poses that look devotional and tortured at the same time.
I turn the pages slowly. The paper feels fragile under my fingers.
Another page. Another column of ancient text. More archaic symbols that seem to press against my eyes the longer I look at them.
Then I stop.
Lightning floods the room again and for one second, the illustration on the page is thrown into perfect relief.
My breath catches.
The thing on the page is identical to the winged creature I saw outside my window, that has been haunting the city’s rooftops.
I’m looking at the grotesque.
Medieval ink darkened with age, but every detail intact. The crouched muscular body, the dragon-like wings, the horns sprouting from a long, birdlike head.
My finger hovers over the illustration, too afraid to touch it.
Thunder rolls through the building's walls, deep enough to tremble in the floor beneath me.
I turn the page.
More ancient text. More symbols. Then something catches my eye near the margin.
Eleanor's handwriting.
I know it from the notes and cards scattered around the apartment, the brittle little reminders she left for herself in drawers and on the writing desk. The same elegant slant, only rougher here. More impatient, almost feverish.
Names. Dates. Apartment numbers.
6C — Child hears too much.
5A — Filth attracts filth.
4D — Would not sell.
Some are crossed out, some circled, all followed by the disturbing notes.
I stare at the page, chilled.
Are these targets? Victims?
Slowly, I look up from the book.
My gaze crosses the living room to Eleanor's writing desk.
The bowl of brass keys sits where it has been since I arrived, half-hidden among the desk clutter. I barely noticed it before. Just another eccentric object in an apartment full of them.
Now it's the only thing I see.
I get to my feet, the book still open in one hand, and cross to the desk.
Dozens of keys fill the bowl. Old brass, worn smooth. Each one tagged and each tag engraved with a number.
A terrible suspicion takes root as I stare down at them. They must be apartment numbers!
Eleanor didn't just own this building. She had keys to everyone inside it.
I take a handful of keys and go out into the hallway.
Time to start exploring this building. What secrets is the Overton hiding in plain sight?
I start my search on the sixth floor. It’s identical to mine yet feels different.
Dust covers the hallways, and I leave footprints behind.
On some level, this doesn’t feel like another floor in the same apartment building.
Instead it feels like I’m entering a tomb and venturing into a place that has been unoccupied for a long time.
I find 6C and try the key.
The lock turns.
The overhead fixture flickers on, buzzing. Dust coats every surface, thick enough to say the room hasn't been disturbed in years.
But the apartment isn't empty.
That's what stops me in the doorway. It's furnished. Fully furnished. It certainly does not look the way an apartment looks when someone moves out. It feels more like someone stepped out for an errand and never came back.
Dishes in the rack beside the sink, dry for years. A stack of mail inside the front door, the envelopes yellowed, the postmarks years old. A woman's cardigan draped over a kitchen chair, as if she set it there while she made coffee and stepped out for a moment.
I stand in the doorway and look at the cardigan for a long time.
Then I pull the door shut and go back to the elevator.
Next up is the fifth floor. Don’t ask me why I pick Apartment A.
I’m greeted by furniture sheeted in white covers that have gathered a thick layer of dust. My eyes take in the family photographs on the walls, hanging slightly crooked, the faces smiling at something outside the frame.
I take note of a child's bedroom off the hallway.
A small bed, shelf of toys, stuffed animals everywhere.
I don't go into the child's bedroom.
In the kitchen, a birthday cake sits on the table. The frosting has dried and cracked and partially collapsed. The candles are still on it, the decorations still spell a name across the top in letters too degraded to read.
Someone's last day in this apartment, preserved.
Water damage creeps across the ceiling in a large brown stains which look like dark eyes intent on following my every move.
I close the apartment behind me and ride down another floor.
Next up, Apartment 4D.
I find the light switch, and the room resolves out of the darkness. I go very still.
The wall opposite the windows is covered in writing. The scribe in question must have used a sharp object to carve those symbols into the white plaster. I try to make sense of the dense layered script.
I recognize some of the symbols.
I’ve seen them before in Eleanor's leather-bound book of occult rituals. Circles and esoteric shapes arranged around a dark purpose I don't understand.
Someone lived here and did this to their wall. Scratched these symbols into the plaster over days or weeks, working across the surface until there was no space left.
I back out of the room, rattled to the core.
As I reach for the door, something shifts in the far corner. A movement at the edge of the light's reach. For a split second, from the corner of my eye, I could swear I saw a human shape move in the dark.
When I stop in my tracks and gaze into the shadowy recesses of the apartment, there's nothing. Goosebumps prick my arms and every instinct in my body is telling me to get out of this place.
Deep down I sense I’m not alone anymore.
Something lurks in this dark tomb of an apartment.
Something that wants to hurt me.
I pivot and run.
I pull the door shut and stand in the hallway and tell myself the cold I feel is the building. Just the building. Old stone. Bad heating. A storm working through the walls.
I look down the hallway in both directions.
Door after door after door, every one of them closed. No light under any of them, no sound. I should be hearing televisions, music, voices, footsteps, but I don’t. There’s zero evidence of any human presence anywhere in this thirty-story building in the middle of Manhattan.
I am completely alone in here.
The thought lands with crushing physical weight.
I start walking toward the elevator when I make out the soft mechanical sound of a latch releasing, followed by a door swinging on its hinges somewhere in the shadows at the far end of the hall.
I stop walking but am too terrified to turn around.
I make out faint footsteps. A shuffling sound of weight on carpet, slow and deliberate, moving in the dark.
"Anyone there?"
My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
The footsteps stop.
Silence fills the hallway. I give myself an internal push and finally turn around. There’s no sign of a living presence.
But that’s the thing. Whatever is making its way down the corridor isn’t alive any longer. No way around it, this building is haunted.
I turn toward the elevator and walk. I press the call button and stand with my back to the hallway and watch the floor indicator above the doors. I do my best not to look behind me.
Do not look, the elevator is coming, almost here?—
The doors ding open.
I get inside, press the lobby button and face the hallway as the doors close with their grinding slowness. And in the distance, a figure with bone-white skin emerges from the darkness. Bloodshot eyes bore into me. And then mercifully the doors slam shut, erasing the nightmare.
I let out a breath I've been holding since the elevator arrived.
My next move is to seek out the super. Like Marian, he’s lived here for years and must know what is going on here. I hate the man but at least he is a human presence in this haunted tower of abandoned dwellings.
The super answers after the third round of pounding, fills the gap of his doorway in a stained undershirt. He sports a bottle of vodka in one hand, and projects the hostility of a man dragged from the comfortable numbness of late-night solo drinking.
"You know what time it is?"
"Why are all the apartments empty?"
I don’t beat around the bush, just cut to the chase.
The super looks at me. He knows that I know. The question is how much.
"Mrs. Shaw liked her privacy."
"How’s this possible? How does one person?—"
"People died. People left. People sold." He takes a drink. "Eleanor was there to collect.”
“Why hasn’t anyone told me about this? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Miss Shaw used various LLCs and shell companies to buy the units. I bet the lawyers and accountants are still making sense of it.”
He says it like it's the most normal thing in the world. An old lady snapping up every unit in a thirty-floor building and leaving the units empty for many years.
My voice shakes with anger.
“You should have told me.”
"Not my job."
I stare at him. This man lived in this building for thirty years, watched Eleanor's quiet project of emptying and acquiring unfold around him, floor by floor, year by year. How could he be so comfortable looking the other way?
"Look at the bright side. You practically own the whole fucking building."
And with these eloquent words, he simply closes the door.
I stand in the lobby of a thirty-story building in the middle of Manhattan at midnight, still trying to absorb the fact that I own it.
Behind me, the elevator hums softly as it returns to the ground floor.
I think about a birthday cake on a kitchen table, the white specter in the hallway, the bloodshot, soulless eyes of the super.
Then my mind turns to Eleanor and all those decades of collecting keys.
No wonder I ride back up in grave silence.
Don’t even ask me how I manage to feel sleepy. But somehow I do.
I lie in Eleanor's bed with the storm moving through the building's bones and my mind replaying the last hour over and over again.
I finally close my eyes again.
The storm softens. My thoughts begin to lose their edges, the way they do at the threshold of sleep, everything becoming slightly less urgent, slightly less?—
STOMP.
My eyes snap open.
The impact is massive and immediate and directly above my head. The ceiling shudders with the force of it. Something with weight, landing on the roof above.
I sit up.
STOMP. STOMP. STOMP.
Closer together now. The rhythm of something moving with purpose across the roof, each impact shuddering through the ceiling, through the building, into the mattress beneath me.
A dragging sound between the impacts — SCRAPE — and then more weight as the thing repositions itself.
I sit completely still in the dark and listen. My heart is racing, blood roaring in my ears. I’m wide awake now.
STOMP.
The ceiling shudders. A thin line of dust sifts down through the darkness and settles onto the white duvet in a pale streak.
This latest sound is followed by silence.
I don't move. I don't breathe. I watch the dust settle on the duvet and wait for the next impact, but it never comes.
Outside, the storm gentles to a murmur, and the city hums on.
I look at the dust on the white duvet.
I know I won’t get much sleep tonight.